FORBES Africa has released a statement calling a cover shared by businessman and media personality DJ S’bu, aka Sibusiso Leope, “fictitious”.
The popular media personality shared an image of him on a cover of Forbes Africa, following the mention of his energy drink Mofaya in a Forbes.com article published on 18 March.
The image was captioned: “Local Start-Up Company #Mofaya gets international recognition from @Forbes USA. For full article click link on my bio.
“What God bless. No man can deny (sic).” The statement released by Forbes Africa in response to the image earlier this afternoon reads as follows:
“On the 20th of March 2015 Forbes Africa was made aware of a fictitious cover being shared on social media of Sibusiso Leope, also known as DJ S’bu. The cover features the entrepreneur and an endorsement of Leope’s locally-manufactured energy drink.
“This release is to inform the public at large that the cover in question, has been fabricated by Leope and in no way represents or warrants an endorsement by Forbes Africa or its affiliates.
“The fabricated cover bears resemblance to an October 28 2013 Forbes US cover featuring Twitter CEO Dick Costolo” S’bu explained that the endorsement was from Forbes America, and the original article from Forbes USA appears here.
The matter is about the cover seen on social media. Leope explains: “I took the thing (the cover image) from social.
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“Someone read and loved the article, and so they shared the images and I thought this ‘this is cool’ because it was so well done so I shared it,” S’bu said.
Forbes Africa public relations marketing executive Sian Schlebusch said Forbes Africa became aware of the image after “a colleague internally who follows him on social media saw the images so it was an internal pick-up”.
On whether Forbes Africa has been in touch with S’bu yet said Schlebusch: “Our legal department is busy drafting legal correspondence for one of his representatives, and he hasn’t been spoken to directly” Schlebusch advised that a decision whether or not to pursue legal action had not been taken.
Leope added: “People acknowledge me all the time, and put my pictures all over the Internet. Just last week someone said I had followed that girl Pulane (who had her naked images leaked online), someone had photoshopped the image showing this and I didn’t do that.”
Leope confirmed that he hadn’t been in touch with Forbes Africa yet. – City Press
